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Network Backup/Batch applications

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by sschmeg

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I am curious on a couple of items and would appreciate hearing what other people do:

1) We all probably run a backup process overnight for our networks. During my backup process I disable users from the network so the backup can complete as quickly and cleanly as possible. However, these days the overnight time available for such things keeps dwindling. How do you handle this? Do you allow your users in and rely on the backup and/or agents to handle open files? Do you keep your users out too?

2) On top of the backup process, one of our keep applications that we need to run our business is based on running batch processing overnight. It is a very 'network unfriendly' application and a user that is simply sitting at a menu and not performing any tasks will prevent batch processing from running. The application requires itself to be active but it requires that only itself be active and no other users. So, this is a 2nd reason I have for dropping users from the network at a particular time. I could write a program that say removes access to this app, lets the batch run, then gives access back. However, considering the 'downtime' for backup I have not done this. Does anyone else have such restraints? How are you handling it?

Thanks for any input!

2 replies

by lkeegan

We don't remove users from access, but depend on the app to take care of open files. I'm curious, how do you remove and restore user access?

by sschmeg

Thanks for the feedback!

I wish the app we have had the ability! Unfortunately, it doesn't.

We are on a windows network. The app in question resides in a particular directory. I simply wrote a vbscript that launches with task scheduler that removes the user group permission that have access to that directory. IE, the directory is left with only admin and system users who have access permissions. So, if a std user tries to get in it - they will not have permission and it returns access denied. Then, I have another script that launches later to restore the user access to the directory.

The particular app is an MRP system from Softbrands called 4th Shift. It has zero administrative functionality so although it needs to run these processes without any users in the system - it literally has zero functions built in to make it happen. So, I have had to devise many various workarounds for it.

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